"We've been using C and C++ way too much - they're nice, but they're very close to the machine and what we wanted was to empower regular users to build applications for Linux"
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There is a quiet provocation in de Icaza's complaint: C and C++ aren’t just “close to the machine,” they’re close to a particular culture. In early Linux, that proximity doubled as a gatekeeping mechanism. If you could juggle pointers, build systems, and obscure compiler errors, you belonged; if you couldn’t, you were relegated to being a user in an ecosystem that claimed to be for users.
De Icaza’s intent is pragmatic but also political. He’s arguing that freedom in software isn’t only about licensing or kernel access; it’s about who gets to participate in making things. “Empower regular users” is a reframing of the Linux promise: not merely to run a free OS, but to shape it. The subtext is that technical purity has a cost. A community can be open-source and still socially closed if its tools demand years of specialized apprenticeship.
Context matters: de Icaza helped build GNOME and later pushed Mono, both attempts to make Linux application development feel less like soldering and more like designing. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Windows had RAD tools and sprawling developer mindshare; Linux had power, but not always approachability. His line acknowledges C/C++ as foundational while insisting they shouldn’t be the only door in.
The rhetoric works because it doesn’t demonize the old guard. “They’re nice” disarms defensiveness, then pivots to a values argument: the platform’s future depends on expanding the creator base, not just optimizing the machine.
De Icaza’s intent is pragmatic but also political. He’s arguing that freedom in software isn’t only about licensing or kernel access; it’s about who gets to participate in making things. “Empower regular users” is a reframing of the Linux promise: not merely to run a free OS, but to shape it. The subtext is that technical purity has a cost. A community can be open-source and still socially closed if its tools demand years of specialized apprenticeship.
Context matters: de Icaza helped build GNOME and later pushed Mono, both attempts to make Linux application development feel less like soldering and more like designing. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Windows had RAD tools and sprawling developer mindshare; Linux had power, but not always approachability. His line acknowledges C/C++ as foundational while insisting they shouldn’t be the only door in.
The rhetoric works because it doesn’t demonize the old guard. “They’re nice” disarms defensiveness, then pivots to a values argument: the platform’s future depends on expanding the creator base, not just optimizing the machine.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coding & Programming |
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